


Sinful City

by thinkpink20



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Hamburg, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-24
Updated: 2012-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-31 16:58:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/346382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkpink20/pseuds/thinkpink20
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Days and nights in Hamburg are like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sinful City

The living in Hamburg is shit. The rooms they sleep in smell like piss and some of the things Paul sees can only be described as hideous. It's the sort of place that, had his mother still been alive, he'd have been ashamed to come home from. He wouldn't be able to look his mother in the face after all this, anyway; all the girls and the pills and the things the pills make him want to do to the girls. He sometimes think it's fate that she went when she did, so that she'd never have to know these things about him, about her little boy.

And everything seems mixed up there. There aren't any rules left, nothing seems any more sordid than anything else - it's like one long holiday of deprivation. Which is his own explanation for what happens between he and John there sometimes. It just seems like another extension of the deprivation, of the things he shouldn't be doing but which he does because they feel good at the time. It's the same as the girls and the Prellies and the hours getting lost on stage, screaming and shouting into the microphone, not caring anymore about making pretty melodies. It's about pleasure. He doesn't yet use the word 'hedonism' for it, but he will do - one day.

The things they do - the things in the blackened alleyways on the The Reeperbahn or in the club toilets when they wedge the door shut with a broken chair so that the knocking Herrs outside can't reach them with anything but their clipped, grating accents - are as base and gratifying as the other pleasures to be found there. The city is so filthy and rotten that Paul doesn't expect it to be anything else; and the worst thing is that he doesn't feel guilty for it all because nothing there feels real. It's temporary - like their time there - and a world away from his warm, clean life at home with Mike and his dad and his sweet, loving aunties. It's a world within his normal world; something he doesn't even associate with himself when he gets home, all that blackness underneath his fingernails and the stink he can't wash off.

So when he's singing 'A Taste Of Honey' and directing his gaze over at John, Paul doesn't feel anything other than the zing of pleasure firing in his belly. He doesn't question the base, primal _need_ to get to John, to get his sweat slicked hands inside the too-tight leather he wears. He doesn't wonder why he fantasises about drawing out those guttural, raw noises from the back of John's throat, or why he feels such thrilling satisfaction from watching the indecent arch of John's neck as he throws his head back and comes, hot and familiar and sticky, onto Paul's hands. The noises he makes - the needy, desperate groans as Paul attacks his neck - it doesn't seem to register as any more wrong than the other things they get up to in Germany, for Paul to get off to those noises. The fact that John likes watching him come, meeting his eyes as his lips fall open with the shock of the pleasure, that John likes pressing his guitar calloused, unwashed fingers against his skin, settles upon Paul as being something abnormal, something wrong - but when the rest of the world around him is like that, he isn't sure they could ever be anything else. He wonders sometimes whether Hamburg has corrupted them, or whether it was always this way between them and simply waiting for the chance to come out. 

Sometimes when the morning is cold and grey and Paul is hungover, walking along the docks because he can't sleep and it's too early even for breakfast, he gets a fear of guilt that grips the front of his chest and threatens to send him so mad he'll jump on the first boat home to Liverpool, where it seems clean and simple and innocent. He stands at the railings and grips on to the cold, stark metal, wondering what has happened to him, and most importantly, whether he can ever come back from it. He feels the memory of the prickle of John on his skin and aches half from disgust and half from arousal. He wants too much - far too much, and that scares him. He feels the polluting creep of Hamburg burrowing under his skin, making him forget what he knows is right and what is wrong. 

And on those mornings, as he stands there amongst the wasted cigarette butts and coarse calls of the sailors departing from scum-lined ships, Paul tries to put the memory of John lying heavy on top of him out of his mind. He tries to forget the shared sweat and wet, dirty kisses as their hands grasp at one another, eager for skin and more pleasure and harder, faster touches. The memories that attack him make Paul harder than he wants to be, make him need John more than he knows it's right to. But still the burrowing worm of Hamburg ploughs on, pushing underneath his skin, because on these mornings he always turns back, back towards their filthy little room where he knows John will be, lying under their thin, cheap blankets.

And he always climbs in beside him, reaches straight for the back of John's pants and drags them down, wasting no time in getting to what he wants. 

He tells himself it's just the grime around him, dirtying up his mind. And when he feels John's eager, ready hips press him down into the filthy mattress underneath them, he tells himself it's just the sin of the city, soaking into both of them.


End file.
